Scholars such as Grek (2009), Ozga (2008), and Ball (2018) have focused on the international organisations’ (IOs) greater propensity to employ soft law or ‘governance by numbers’ to exercise their governance at a distance. Central to these soft mechanisms has been the recognition of the IOs’ technocratic expertise and their role as knowledge producers (Zapp 2017). It is, however, not just the numbers that give the IOs the legitimacy to push forward particular agendas into and across the boundaries of nation-states but also how an agenda gets framed and then goes unchallenged should it gains political popularity. The frames that the IOs use to promote their mission involve the process of defining and calling attention to certain problems while obscuring others (Coleman, Thorson, & Wilkins, 2011; Entman, 1993). A plausible construction of a ‘causal story’, in particular, serves as a strong leverage for proposing a ‘good diagnosis’ and different alternative futures (Alaily-Mattar, Thierstein, & Förster, 2014; Verger, 2012). This paper focuses on how the IOs – in particular the OECD – discursively shifted away from their long-held logics of human capital approach by embracing a humanist vision of education and unpacks the different political rationale(s) behind the OECD’s recent ‘humanitarian turn’ in education (Li & Auld, 2020). 

To date, an increasing interest has been observed in the OECD’s progressive shift towards (seemingly) ‘humanistic’ and less instrumental visions and initiatives of education, most notably the introduction of the ‘Creative Thinking’ assessment in PISA 2022 (Grey & Morris, 2022), the expansion of PISA to low- and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (Auld, Li, & Morris, 2022), and its efforts to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (Cobb & Couch, 2022). There is, however, a serious dearth of studies that situate the OECD’s happiness and, more generally, well-being initiatives within the framework of ‘humanitarian turn’, and this is where this paper aims to make its contribution. This paper fills in the void by tracing and examining how the concepts of happiness and well-being emerged and stood out as one of the key policy signifiers of the OECD’s education agenda over the past decade and for what purpose. 

The guiding questions addressed in this paper include: (i) what were the core educational beliefs and priorities of the OECD, and how have they changed since its inception in the 1960s?; (ii) how do these changing beliefs and priorities explain the emergence of the happiness and well-being agendas both in the general works and in the education agenda of the OECD?; and, lastly, (iii) how, since their first emergence, did the meanings attributed to happiness and well-being change, and for what purpose? 

The analysis of this paper draws on a corpus of the OECD’s electronic and media resources which include documents (i.e. publications related to PISA and the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030, country reports, working papers, blogs, press releases), YouTube clips, as well as Webcast PowerPoint slides. It traces the emergence and development of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ not only as a measure of progress but also as the goal of the OECD’s educational initiatives. Throughout the process, I identified three specific ‘categories’ of reports that reflect the OECD’s understanding and conception of student happiness and well-being. The first category reflects the OECD’s efforts to extend its measurement horizon beyond cognitive outcomes by ‘measuring’ student happiness. The data, therefore, includes the official PISA reports (PISA 2012, 2015, and 2018), as well as its student well-being framework, PISA in Focus documents, and any related working papers. The second category identifies happiness as the ‘goal’ of the Organisation’s futuristic education agenda, also known as the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030. A wide array of reports and papers including, but not limited to, background papers, brochures, conceptual learning frameworks, meeting documents (e.g. informal working group documents), progress reports, and concept notes, are collected and subsequently analysed. The third and final category includes more recent initiatives that the OECD has been undertaking. These initiatives signify the possibility of some changes in the meanings the OECD attributes to the notion of ‘happiness’. Two notable initiatives are (1) the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills; and (2) the CERI project on Fostering and Assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking in Education, in which notions that were in the past associated with non-cognitive ‘outcomes’ of learning are now increasingly described as ‘soft skills’ essential for the changing labour market needs and economic success. These materials are analysed thematically through an inductive interpretive approach, focusing on the various underpinnings of the two concepts and how they became implicated and embedded into the OECD’s broader futuristic visions of education.

There has been a wide range of extant literature that revealed that global agencies, such as the European Union, OECD, and World Bank, continue to promote their human capital ideals in the guise of humanistic and humanitarian movements (Barros, 2012; Li & Auld, 2020; Jones, 2007). This paper argues that the growing proliferation of the use of the concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ should be understood not only as part of the OECD’s ‘humanitarian turn’ but also as part of the efforts to (i) reposition and extend its role beyond the narrow measurement and expertise of cognitive skills, (ii) (re)align their educational agenda with the changing imaginary of the future economy, and (iii) by doing so, maintain its relevance and legitimacy in the global education governance (see also, Lee & Morris, 2022). This paper unpacks the ‘floating’ nature of the two concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ and shows how these concepts have been continuously rearticulated to fit the OECD’s broader political and economic visions. While the gradual inclusion of such non-cognitive domains of learning outcomes from ‘student happiness at school’ in PISA 2012 to the measurement of ‘soft skills’ in the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) in 2021 can be interpreted as ‘the maturation of the Organisation’s humanitarian approach’ (Li & Auld, 2020, p. 513), what should not be overlooked in the discussion is the implications of the OECD’s ultimate branding of ‘individual and collective-wellbeing’ as the alternative ‘future we want’ (OECD, 2019).

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